20 August 2012

A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar

I read this when we'd just gotten back to the US after Melissa reviewed it. How could I pass up a book with Kashgar in the title?

It's one of those books where you have two different, seemingly unrelated (although it was pretty clear how they would be connected) stories running along in pieces that only come together at the end. That's generally not my favorite style of book, but it's not terrible either.

The problem I really had was that I felt like the entire Kashgar part felt forced and fairly unrealistic. I felt that the author had read a lot about East Turkestan in the early 1900s from Europeans' perspectives, particularly European missionaries, but that wasn't enough to create a story set in Kashgar and East Turkestan, at least for me. The three European women in Kashgar were all a bit over the top for me too, in their own ways.

But if I ignored all that and didn't think about the book being set in Kashgar, or think about history, it wasn't a bad story. The modern-day part was pretty good, in fact.